Real Journalism?

 

Let us imagine that at some point in his youth Bartley Kives received a visit from the News Fairy who told him that someday, if he was very, very good, she would grant his wish and he would become a real journalist.   Kives, however, after high school went on to receive a degree in sociology from the University of Winnipeg.   It is very difficult to take a degree in sociology from anywhere without squashing your conscience like a chirping little annoying bug.   When the school is the University of Winnipeg it is virtually impossible.    While signing away your soul in a blood contract with Mephistopheles and Karl Marx may not actually be a formal requirement for the degree, it would seem to be de rigueur. 

 

For almost two decades Kives reported and wrote for the Winnipeg Free Press, covering pretty much everything from music to city politics to restaurants.   While occasionally the Winnipeg Free Press has employed a real journalist – Ted Byfield, believe it or not, worked for the paper back in the fifties and, of course, the late, great Tom Oleson graced its pages until shortly before his death almost ten years ago – for the most part Manitoba’s “paper of repute” has preferred hack writers that mindlessly toe its party line.    On issues that pertain to the Dominion of Canada as a whole, that party line is and always has been, Liberal, both big and small l.   In John Wesley Dafoe’s day the paper existed to promote the Grits’ agenda of Americanizing Canada and turning her into a vassal satellite of the United States.   When the federal Liberal Party was taken over by Communist operatives in the 1960s – Lester Pearson, who had been a Cambridge Five style Soviet spy when attached to our embassy in Washington D. C. in World War II, and Pierre Trudeau who had led the Canadian delegation to a Communist economic conference in Moscow in 1952 and who never met a Community tyrant he didn’t love and adore and fawn over – the paper dutifully followed its party into the fever swamps of the far left.   Radically opposite as those two positions seem, they were united in their contempt for the traditional constitution of Canada and for the Common Law freedoms of Canadians.  John Farthing showed in Freedom Wears a Crown, (1956) how the policies of the earlier, Mackenzie King Liberals, had undermined freedom and paved the way for Prime Ministerial dictatorship.   A decade earlier Eugene Forsey, after his doctoral dissertation was published, had debated the very same issues with Dafoe, making mincemeat out of the partisan publisher. On the provincial level, where the Grits have been mostly a non-entity for the larger part of a century, the paper has tended to support the NDP. 

 

In more recent years Kives has been reporting locally for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.   Abandoning the overt and heavy progressive bias of the Winnipeg Free Press is hardly a requirement for employment at the CBC.    Although the publicly funded Crown broadcaster is supposed to fairly represent the views of all Canadians it has long behaved like “anybody but the Conservatives” was its official policy, regardless of who happens to be in power at the moment in either Parliament or any of the provincial legislatures. 

 

The Progressive Conservatives have been in government in Manitoba since 2016 and the CBC, like the Winnipeg Free Press, has been striving to unseat them ever since.    Coincidentally or not 2016 was also the year that Kives was brought onboard CBC Manitoba.   In 2019, the efforts of the media failed and the Conservatives, led by Brian Pallister, were returned to power in an early provincial election.   The following year the bat flu pandemic struck, and the media in general, and Kives in particular found in it a stick with which to bludgeon the provincial government.

 

Now if, as has been thought to be case for centuries, it is the role and duty of the fourth estate to hold government accountable, to ask it the tough questions, to shine a light in every dark corner of the halls of authority, to expose all the secrets, to speak truth to power, does this not mean that the News Fairy has returned at long last and turned Kives into a real journalist after all?

 

Alas the answer is no.

 

It would be one thing if he really were asking Pallister and his chief health mandarin Brent Roussin the hard questions.   Questions like:

 

Do you recognize any constitutional limits to your powers that remain in effect even in an emergency?

 

In your opinion are the fundamental rights and freedoms of Manitobans their own property or something that is permitted to them by your government as you see fit?

 

How much mental, social, and economic damage would the lockdowns have to do before the cost of the lockdowns exceeds the cost of doing nothing at all?

 

How far would government restrictions have to go before you would admit they have gone too far and crossed a line that should never be crossed?

 

Kives does not seem to be interested in the answers to questions like these however.   He does not even seem to be interested in questions like those that Pallister groupie, Josh Aldrich of the Winnipeg Sun, is occasionally willing to interrupt his sycophantic boot-licking to ask about why the government has been consistently picking on small businesses and restaurants, which are not significant sources of transmission, with its public health orders.

 

No, the only questions Kives seems to be interested in are “why didn’t you lock us down again faster?” and “why didn’t you lock us down again harder?”

 

The theory that Kives appears to be operating on, based upon much of his recent commentary but especially “Lockdown 3, the one everyone could foresee” from the 8^th of May, and last Sunday’s “In Manitoba’s darkest days, the premier casts shade”, is that the province’s slapping down a hard lockdown as fast as possible last spring was a success, that their gradually increasing the restrictions in stages in the fall as the case numbers rose only to see them continue to rise was a failure, and that therefore they should have locked down the entire province hard as soon as they saw case numbers start to rise again this spring.  

 

One problem with this theory is that while Manitoba’s initial hard lockdown did indeed, seem to work, last spring, other provinces and other jurisdictions in other countries that tried the same thing at the same time, met with failure instead, and had the sort of results that we saw in the fall.   What is the explanation for this difference?

 

The most obvious explanation is that the virus had only just arrived in the province and had been caught before it had begun to spread in the brief period in which it was capable of being contained in this manner.      If this is indeed the true explanation, then last spring’s success would not have been duplicable in the fall.   All an earlier and harder lockdown would have accomplished would have been to make the lockdown that much worse in its harmful and destructive effects.  

 

Anybody familiar with the history of infectious disease and the way quarantines work should be able to grasp this.   Quarantines control the spread of infectious disease by either a) keeping it out in the first place or b) containing it so that it doesn’t spread.    The former is what the traditional method of placing ships and their passengers and cargo under quarantine before letting them into a country was designed to accomplish.   The latter is what the kind of quarantine where a doctor locked you into your house for a couple of weeks and had your neighbours drop food off on your doorstep when you had the smallpox or measles or some such thing was designed to accomplish.    The strongest quarantine of the latter type was the kind the French called the cordon sanitaire, where an entire city or region was sealed off, in the hopes of preventing the disease from spreading outside the area.   This practice was depicted in a fictional example by Albert Camus in The Plague (1947).   In more recent real life it was used in several places to contain the original SARS virus and Ebola.   What governments around the world have attempted to do with the lockdown model since last spring is something radically different from these traditional quarantine methods.   Indeed, it could be called the inversion of a quarantine.    It is not designed to keep a disease out of a country or contain it locally because it is imposed on societies where the disease is already present and spreading.   It is not imposed merely upon the sick and those known to have been in contact with the sick while contagious but upon all healthy members of a society, thus causing a ton of collateral damage.   It is not remotely as effective as traditional quarantines – last year’s experiment demonstrated that countries and regions that rejected the lockdown model did not end up being the countries and regions most devastated by the disease or even being significantly worse off than countries and regions that locked down.  In some cases they fared slightly better with regards to the disease itself and in all cases avoided the tremendous harmful effects of the lockdown.

 

Kives’ commentary is padded with tear-jerking rhetoric about the “deaths of hundreds of grandfathers and grandmothers”.   How many of those grandfathers and grandmothers died, not because of the disease this overhyped virus causes, but because of the extreme loneliness and despair created by being forced into social isolation in the name of saving their lives?   This is the sort of question a real journalist would be asking.   A real journalist would also be interested in all the sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters lost to opioid and other narcotic overdoses and suicides brought about by social isolation and/or the loss of the business in which all of their life’s work and savings had been invested caused by lockdown experiment.   Anyone interested in such people would not be so quick to shoot his mouth off about how the government has not been doing enough by not locking down fast enough and hard enough.

 

Where Kives does get it right is in raising questions about Brian Pallister’s stock excuse for how bad the province has done in the fall and again this spring.   In his remarks on Sunday, for example, Kives said:

 

The premier and public health officials routinely state that Manitobans are simply not following the rules at a time when community spread makes it difficult for people to avoid the virus in the workplace and elsewhere.

 

He then quoted an ICU physician from Winnipeg to the effect that most of her patients had been trying to follow the rules.

 

It is, of course, disgusting for Pallister, Roussin, and their underlings to continuously scapegoat ordinary Manitobans in this way.     To scapegoat is to blame someone else for your own failure.   The provincial government has failed Manitobans and not the other way around.   The government’s failure, however, is not a matter of them not suspending our constitutional rights and freedoms severely and quickly enough.   It is rather their refusal or inability to consider the myriad of options other than preventing us from socializing with one another until everyone is vaccinated.   

 

On Tuesday, the 25^th of May, a number of Manitoban physicians held a press conference in which they talked about “tens of thousands” of Manitobans who are suffering and dying, waiting for surgeries and cancer tests, because the hospitals are too busy dealing with bat flu patients.   They begged the province to issue a stay-at-home order and to order all “non-essential” businesses to shut down.   Sure enough, come the evening news, there is Bartley Kives on CBC, gushing all over these doctors and uncritically sympathizing with their plea, even though he was supposed to be reporting rather than editorializing.

 

“For nearly two months”, Kives said, “doctors have been pleading with the province to enact tougher restrictions to prevent the crush of COVID patients from getting out of hand.   Those pleas largely went unanswered.”

 

Who is he trying to kid?   For the nearly two months in question, I have watched as what little of Manitobans’ constitutional rights and freedoms as were left to us after the previous six months of Code Red have been whittled away as the government has given in to demand after demand from these doctors who are largely sheltered from the harmful effects of the fascism for which they are asking.

 

Doctors, as a rule, live in houses rather than apartments or single-rooms, and so, a stay-at-home order, restricting them to their homes outside of work hours and grocery shopping, would simply not be as confining to them as it would to the thousands of other Manitobans far more adversely affected by such an order.   Doctors are pretty much the hottest commodity in the marriage market and so, even though their notoriously insufferable egos keep the divorce rate high, a stay-at-home order would simply not leave them as completely isolated from human social contact as it would the thousands of people in the province who live alone.    Lockdowns do not threaten the livelihoods and savings of doctors – they will continue to rake in their highly overinflated salaries for the duration, with all the overtime they could dream of to boot.

 

Perhaps if a law were enacted requiring any doctor, journalist, or politician that calls for a lockdown to experience that lockdown in its harshest rather than its mildest form – confine them to a single room, not just their home in general, deny them contact with their immediate family, strip them of their salaries, for the duration of the orders they request – they would think twice before asking the government to place burdens on their neighbours that they are not willing to lift themselves.

 

Earlier, in his 8^th of May commentary, Kives had quoted Brent Roussin as saying, when he announced the third lockdown:

 

“We need to have these restrictions be the least restrictive that we need for that time.”

 

The necessity to which Roussin was likely alluding is that created by the requirements of our constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court of Canada in the 1986 Oakes ruling.   It is indeed, required, the Supreme Court ruled, that when the government has a legitimate reason for limiting our basic rights and freedoms, that the limits it so imposes be as few as possible.   A real journalist who believed it to be the fourth estate’s duty to stand up for the rights and freedoms of the people by sounding the alarm and calling the government out whenever it overstepped the constitutional boundaries on its powers, would have grilled Roussin on his claim that the restrictions he has imposed have indeed been minimal.

 

Kives, however, took the opposite approach of insisting that the government could have and should have done more.

 

Is it just me or did I see his nose grow a little in his last news segment?

 

He’s got a long way to go, I am afraid, before the News Fairy makes him a real journalist.  

Alberta's Left Turn

I had not been following the recent provincial election campaign in Alberta. I found it interesting, therefore, when Kevin Michael Grace over at The Ambler predicted an NDP win shortly before the election, but I was not really surprised when this prediction came true. Mr. Grace has frequently demonstrated his acute insight into the myriad of aspects of Canadian politics and the NDP and Alberta are not as odd of a match as many people seem to think. Capitalism and socialism have never really been polar opposites, they are more the opposite sides of a single coin, perhaps the plugged nickel. Both think that the acquisition of money is the purpose for human existence, with the difference between the two being that capitalists think that money should be obtained through the free exchange of goods, services, and labour whereas socialists think it is better for the government to take money from those who already have it and give it to other people. I don’t wish to trivialize this difference – the former, being relatively the more honest of the two, is clearly to be preferred by sane, decent, and normal people over the latter, the preference of crooks, scoundrels, and fools – but the difference pales in comparison to that between the shared assumptions of capitalism and socialism and the truth that there are many things more important in life than making money.

For as long as I can remember I have heard Alberta described as Canada’s “most conservative province” but I have long questioned the accuracy of this designation. It might have been true at one time. In the fall of 1936, Stephen Leacock, the famous Canadian professor, economist, social commentator, and humorist began a lecture tour of the Western provinces and he described his experiences in My Discovery of the West: A Discussion of East and West In Canada, which was published by Thomas Allen in Toronto in 1937. In his ninth chapter, “Monarchy in the West”, Leacock wrote that:

People who know nothing about it always imagine that the West of Canada is far less British than the East. Apart from the Maritime Provinces this is not so. It is even the reverse of truth.

From this he went on to argue that the large number of Americans who had moved up to the Canadian West between 1905 and 1914 made “no great difference as to the British connection and British institutions” because Americans had been British originally, and were reverting to their roots. He put it in these memorable words:

It used to be said that the last shot fired in defence of British institutions in America would be fired by a French-Canadian. It looks now as if there would be one more shot after his. It will be from the gun of an American whose name will be something like John Bull McGregor. His people will have been among the McGregors of Mississippi and the Bulls of the New York police: so he won't miss what he shoots at.

If Leacock’s assessment of 1936 Alberta was accurate, that those settling the province valued Canada’s British institutions, had not a trace of republicanism, and that the former Americans among them would be the ones to fire that last shot on behalf of the Crown, then it might have been true to say, at that time, that Alberta was the most conservative province in the Dominion. That was then. This is now.

In Canada, a conservative is someone who believes in and supports the traditional British institutions of this country. This was historically true even of conservative French Canadians – and until the 1960s French Canadians were very conservative indeed – for while their primary concern might have been the preservation of their language, Roman Catholicism, and their traditional way of life, they understood that these things had been guaranteed by the Crown since 1774 and that had all of British North America gone over to the American Republic in the Revolution their language, religion, and culture would not have survived. The two best articulations of the political meaning of conservatism in the Canadian context, John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown and John G. Diefenbaker’s These Things We Treasure, the first by a central Canadian who grew up in Ontario and Quebec, the second by a Westerner, who grew up and practiced law in Saskatchewan before entering federal politics, both argued that Canada’s British institutions were the foundation and framework of our traditional rights and freedoms and that the latter stand and fall with the former.

If Alberta were the most conservative province in Canada that would mean that the ideas in the preceding paragraph would be more prevalent in Alberta than anywhere else in the country. Is this the case? Hardly. Indeed, one of the most curious things about many who identify as conservative in the province of Alberta is an inability to put two and two together and come up with four on this matter.

From 1963, when Lester Pearson became Prime Minister until 1984 when Pierre Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister, the Liberal Party of Canada waged an aggressive war against Canada’s British institutions and traditions. They removed the designation “Royal” from many institutions including the post office and the navy. They insisted that we needed a new flag of our own, even though the Canadian Red Ensign had been declared our country’s flag by Order-In-Council in 1945, three days after the end of the war in which it had been baptized our national flag in the blood of the soldiers who fought under it in our country’s finest hour. It was the Union Jack in the canton that made the old flag objectionable to them. These are just two examples, many more could be provided. At the same time the Liberal Party was attacking Canada’s British heritage and institutions it was also attacking and undermining the basic traditional freedoms of Canadians. In the early 1970s they added a law against “hate propaganda” to the Criminal Code, which set a bad precedent for freedom of speech by making certain types of speech illegal on the basis of the thoughts expressed within them. Existing laws governing speech, such as the law against incitement, only made speech illegal when it called upon people to commit violence and break the law. Then the Liberals passed the Canadian Human Rights Act, an attack on freedom of association patterned on the American Civil Rights Act of the previous decade, which further attacked freedom of speech with its chilling Section 13, designating hate speech as an illegal act of discrimination and defining it so broadly that virtually anything offensive to those protected against discrimination would qualify. Finally, when they repatriated the British North America Act, they tacked onto it a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that under the guise of securing for us the rights and freedoms we already possessed by prescription as subjects of the Crown, nullified those rights and freedoms. (1) These attacks upon traditional and basic prescriptive rights and liberties, producing the oppressive politically correct atmosphere that Albertan “conservatives” rightly object to, were carried out at the same time and by the same people who were ripping apart our British heritage, proving the analysis of traditional Canadian Tories like Farthing and Diefenbaker, that our freedoms stand and fall with our British traditions, institutions, and heritage, to be correct.

Yet many Albertan “small c conservatives” don’t seem to get this. To the last man they have an intense loathing for Pierre Trudeau and the Liberal Party, yet many of them show little interest in turning to Canada’s British institutions, traditions, and heritage. Indeed, I have known more than a few of them to approach our British heritage with an attitude of contempt scarcely distinguishable from Trudeau’s own. Royalism is the sine qua non of conservatism in Canada, a non-negotiable, and Pierre Trudeau was notorious for, among other things, his disrespect for Her Majesty, yet you will encounter in Alberta, far more than anywhere else in Canada, people who claim to be Trudeau-hating conservatives but who are republicans rather than royalists. Self-identified Albertan “conservatives” tend to be continentalists – sometimes to the point of being annexationists – and free traders, both of which, ironically, are positions that historically belonged to the Liberal Party. It is further ironic that free trade was only embraced by the Conservative Party in the 1980s under the leadership of Brian Mulroney, the Conservative leader most hated in Alberta, whose misgovernment drove traditional Conservative Party voters, not only in Alberta but throughout the West, into the Reform Party of Canada.

This does not sound like a conservative province – more like a belligerently regionalist province with a chip on its shoulder. Localism is an important element of conservative thought, but in a form similar to the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity, never anti-patriotism.

Where then does Alberta’s “conservative” reputation come from?

Is it the most socially conservative province?

When one thinks of social conservatism – in the sense of opposition to the moral and social disintegration that has taken place in the United States, Canada and the rest of the Western world since World War as manifest in such things as the collapse of social authority, no-fault divorce, birth control, abortion, the sexual revolution, cohabitation without marriage, serial marriages, alternative sexualities, and the like – three voices come to mind as having spoken louder on behalf of social conservatism in Canada than any other – George Grant, William Gairdner, and Ted Byfield. All three were from central Canada.

Yes, that’s right, all three. Ted Byfield, the founder of the Alberta Report which joined Christian social conservatism with a defiant Western and particularly Alberta populism, was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario. That, in itself, does not perhaps say much, especially since moral and social decay, and worse, government brainwashing of the young against traditional norms, has gone further in Ontario, under the premierships of McGuinity and Wynne than anywhere else in the country. Nevertheless, it is in Alberta that the Rev. Stephen Boissoin was dragged before the Human Rights Tribunal – they have one of these odious kangaroo courts in Alberta too – for writing a letter to the editor, criticizing the actions of the politicized homosexual movement.

More substantially, Albertans more than any other Canadians, love American popular culture and oppose any attempt on the part of the national government to protect domestic Canadian culture. While our cultural protectionist policies have been a complete failure, and indeed have done harm rather than good, my point is that there is nothing that has done more to erode traditional social institutions, the authority of parents, teachers, and churches, and moral standards, than Hollywood films, pop and rock music, and television programming. A social conservatism that is wed to an objection, at the theoretical level, to cultural protectionism on the liberal grounds of market freedom, is a social conservatism that has laid down, raised the white flag, and given up.

The other grounds on which some have claimed that Alberta is the most conservative province are those of fiscal and economic conservatism. Fiscal conservatism is the idea that the state should live within its means and not export its costs into the future for posterity to pay. The economic ideas regarded as being conservative in Alberta are actually economic liberalism – free markets, free trade, and low taxes to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit, promoting economic growth that creates jobs and generates wealth. These two ideas are not always compatible. The goal of economic liberalism is constant growth so it always calls for lower taxes, whereas fiscal conservatism recognizes that to meet its goal, of not creating burdens for future generations, taxes may sometimes need to be raised in the present. It has been my impression that for most Albertan conservatives when these two ideas and goals clash, it is economic liberalism that wins out over fiscal conservatism. At any rate, actual economic conservatism is a variation of economic liberalism called economic nationalism, in which the government passes laws and taxes that favour and protect domestic production, thus exporting its costs not to future generations but to foreign companies and countries, as an entrance fee for access to the national market. Needless to say this idea would go over like a ton of bricks in Alberta.

Which brings us back to what I said at the beginning about capitalism and socialism – they are not polar opposites, but two sides of the same coin. That Alberta, the bastion of economic liberalism in Canada, would flip the coin and a give a majority government to the socialist party of high taxes and even higher spending, the very opposite of fiscal conservatism, is less of a shock than it would have been had the province managed to put fiscally conservative economic patriots into power.

The NDP is about more than socialism, of course. It is also about feminism, abortion-on-demand, anti-white racism, climate change alarmism, the Orwellian thought control that is political correctness, and the triumph of the abnormal over the normal and the average over the exceptional. Albertans will find to their horror that it is these latter things, even more than socialism, that they have in store for them under an NDP government.

The NDP is also, however, the most anti-Canadian of parties, when Canada is rightly understood as being the British country, confederated under the Crown in Parliament in 1867, upon a foundation rooted in Loyalism. The NDP wish to finish what he Pearson-Trudeau Liberals started in the 1960s-1980s, and obliterate our British heritage entirely, abolishing the upper chamber in Parliament, and severing the country’s ties to the monarchy. Had Alberta truly been the most conservative province in the country, the NDP’s contempt for Canada’s British traditions and institutions would have prevented them from ever giving the NDP a single seat. Many Albertans, however, chose to join what ideas they had that were fiscally or socially conservative, to a very unconservative anti-Canadian, anti-patriotism that is not that far removed from that of the NDP, making this election’s outcome much less of a surprise, although no less of a disaster.

(1) Section 33 effectively nullifies all the rights and freedoms listed in section 2, and sections 7 through 15.

Steven Fletcher, the Byfields, and the Failure of Canada's New Right

A little over twenty years ago, Dr. Samuel T. Francis, the American paleoconservative columnist who departed from this world far too soon ten years ago this month, saw a collection of several of his best essays and articles published by the University of Missouri Press under a title borrowed from Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers. The subtitle of the book was “Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism.” This was an interesting choice that raised many an eyebrow considering that the book saw print in the early 1990s, immediately after the period that mainstream American conservatism regarded as its moment of triumph, the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Dr. Francis looked beyond the superficiality of American conservatism’s seeming triumph and made the uncomfortable observation that the movement had failed to achieve a single one of its objectives – the restoration of their old republic, the rollback of the welfare state that was eroding America’s middle class, or victory in the war against the ongoing social, moral, and cultural revolution.

A recent conflux of occurrences could not help but bring to my mind certain parallels between this and the present state of Canadian conservatism. The February edition of the curiously titled monthly evangelical publication Christian Week features a cover story by Craig Macartney about a bill that had gone before the Senate for debate that would legalize assisted suicide. The focus of the article is upon how legalization has been gathering support among Christians. Steven Fletcher, the Winnipeg MP who authored the bill, is interviewed and pretty much the first thing he is cited as saying is that polls indicate “strong support for assisted suicide, even among professed Christians”. Perhaps Mr. Fletcher thinks that questions of what is true and right are matters to be settled by opinion polls.

Later in the article Fletcher comes off somewhat better as he predicts last Friday’s decision by the dotty old dolts, dingbats, and dipsticks on the Supreme Court to strike the laws against assisted suicide from the Criminal Code and indicates that it was in partial anticipation of this decision that he had authored the bill so that the question would not become a “free-for-all, with no restrictions”. Perhaps that is the best we can expect in this day and age in which case Mr. Fletcher doesn’t really deserve to be made the butt of a joke, inspired by the quadriplegic politician’s sharing a last name with the character played by Dame Angela Lansbury in her most celebrated role, and to have his bill dubbed “Murder He Wrote”. Whether Fletcher’s motives are noble or base, however, is not really the question or the point here. He is a member, not only of Parliament, but of the present Conservative Party which currently forms the majority government in Parliament, and a professing Christian to boot. That he would initiate a bill for the legalization of assisted suicide shows just how far that party has come from its roots.

The present Conservative Party claims two sets of roots for itself – those of the old Conservative Party, which had been around since before Confederation having been formed in Canada as a local version of the same party in Britain, and those of the Reform Party of Canada. In the late 1990s the “Unite the Right” movement led most of the old Conservative Party to join the Reform Party in what then became the Canadian Alliance. The full merger between the two parties into the present party was completed in the fall of 2003.

This merger has been alternately interpreted as both the triumph and the defeat of the Reform Party, the movement that gave birth to it, and the principles of that movement which we shall call the Canadian “New Right” for reasons that we will look at momentarily. These interpretations would seem to be mutually exclusive and the polar opposite of each other yet, paradoxically, they are both true. If success for a political movement is understood strictly in terms of the attainment of power then the New Right has succeeded, for the party it founded managed, first of all, to take over the old Conservative Party’s place as the main alternative to the Liberals, then to absorb that party into itself and take over its name, next to form a minority government in Parliament, and finally to win a majority in a federal election.

Yet, if we consider what the principles and objectives of the New Right movement actually were, the merger that led to the present government of Stephen Harper can hardly be viewed as a smashing success.

I have called this movement the Canadian “New Right” for two reasons. The first is its contrast with the Old Right. The Canadian Old Right, of which the original Conservative Party was the organized political expression, was a Canadian adaptation of British classical conservatism or Toryism. The essence of Canadian Toryism was loyalty to and defence of the traditions, and political, social, and cultural institutions, of Canada, especially her British heritage. It was fundamentally patriotic. The New Right, by contrast, had taken up the cause of Western regional dissatisfaction with Ottawa which it frequently expressed in anti-patriotic and anti-Canadian tones, with some of its leaders openly expressing or at least doing little to conceal their preference for American history, heritage, tradition and institutions over that of Canada. This antipatriotism was the ugliest aspect of the New Right and it was this that initially hindered the New Right from gaining strength outside of the West and becoming a national movement. Unfortunately, as we shall see, the leaders of the party the movement produced, chose to listen to their liberal and progressive critics who told them that it was the movement’s positions on social, moral, and cultural issues that was holding it back.

The second reason for calling the movement the Canadian New Right is the fact that it arose at the same time and in response to similar phenomena as parallel movements in the United States and Europe which were also known as the “New Right”.

The New Right, in Canada as in the United States and Europe, was born in the 1970s in response to the tidal wave of changes that had swept Western Civilization since the end of the Second World War. These included social and moral changes as Christian countries became more secular, Christianity, the Bible, and prayer were driven from public schools, as was much discipline due to new-fangled psychological and educational theories, the development of effective contraceptive technology led to the relaxing of both legal and cultural restraints on sexual behaviour, divorce became easily obtainable, abortion was legalized, a revolution against distinct roles for the sexes took place, and in which a kind of Western self-loathing took over the hearts and minds of the youth and their teachers in institutions of higher learning who came to see everything Western and Christian as oppressive and to venerate everything that was neither Western nor Christian. The Canadian New Right, just like the American New Right and the European New Right, was born out of righteous anger at this wave of changes and the desire to regain what had been swept away by it.

In Canada, the New Right grew and gained its greatest strength in the Western provinces. It was in the West that the remarkable periodical that became the movement’s primary organ was published for thirty years. It started out as the St. John’s Edmonton Report in 1973 when it was founded by Ted Byfield, a seasoned journalist turned Christian educator, but by the end of the decade had become the Alberta Report, the title under which it is still remembered today, despite undergoing a couple more name changes before ceasing publication in 2003, a few months before the merger that produced the present Conservative Party. For the largest part of its three decades of publication, its editor-publisher was Ted Byfield’s son Link who was also a Sun Media columnist, the founder of foundation/lobby the Citizens Centre for Freedom and Democracy (1) as well as the co-founder of and a candidate for Alberta’s Wildrose Party. Link Byfield’s untimely death from cancer last month is the other in the conflux of occurrences that has brought about this reflection on the success and failure of the New Right which he and his father did so much to shape and form.

The Byfields were devout Christians. When my maternal grandmother introduced me to their magazine in the early 1990s she told me it was published by a family of “Christian fundamentalists”. More precisely, they were a family of conservative Anglicans who, having gotten fed up with liberal domination of the Anglican Church of Canada, had joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in the case of the father and the Roman Catholic Church in the case of the son. To each issue of their magazine, the elder Byfield contributed, in addition to his last page editorial, a column called “Orthodoxy” which he co-wrote with his wife Virginia, devoted to religious issues. In 2001 the magazine ran advertisements a two-week tour of Israel and Greece, “Where Christian civilization was born”, that was to be hosted by Link Byfield and his wife Joanne. After the Report, Ted Byfield’s next project was a multi-volume history of Christianity from the days of Christ to the present. Opposition, rooted in Christianity, to the rapid social, moral, and cultural decay that has been rotting Canada and the rest of the civilization that used to be Christendom, was the basis of their editorial perspective and since their magazine paved the way for the creation of the Reform Party of Canada in 1988, this social conservatism was clearly the foundation of the New Right movement.

This is why the present Conservative government is more truthfully to be regarded as the failure of the New Right rather than its success. As the Reform Party grew from a Western regional party to a party that could potentially form the government in Ottawa it was constantly being told that its social conservatism was the baggage holding it back, preventing it from gaining the support it would need to oust the Liberals from government. As leader of the united Conservative party, Stephen Harper has refused to re-open the debates on abortion and same-sex marriage, even after that vapid twit Justin Trudeau and that creep Thomas Mulcair provided him with the perfect window of opportunity to do so last year, by declaring that anyone who did not toe the progressive party line on these issues was no longer welcome in their parties. Now, one of his own members has initiated a bill that would open the door to euthanasia in this country.

The idea that its social conservatism would have perpetually kept the New Right localized in the West as a regional protest movement is nonsense. Are the majority of Canadians outside the Western provinces – or at least in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec – really happy with unlimited abortion-on-demand, the ensuing low birth and fertility rates, dependence upon large scale immigration with no effort to assimilate the newcomers to keep up the population, high rates of illegitimacy among those children who are born, high divorce rates, and all the other rot that social conservatism objected to? That seems extremely difficult to believe. Even if that turns out to be the case, the leaders of what used to be the New Right and the Reform Party need to ask themselves whether attaining a majority government in Ottawa was worth the price of sacrificing all of the goals they hoped to accomplish in order to do so. Which is another way of asking what Jesus Christ asked two thousand years ago:

What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

(1) The Byfields transferred ownership of the magazine from their United Western Communications company to this organization for the last few months of its run. Unfortunately, when they did so they changed the name of the magazine to Citizens Centre Report, by far the least attractive sounding of the many variations on “Report” under which it had been published.

Why the Church Should Not Perform Same-Sex Blessings

An Exercise in Stating the Obvious


But unto the ungodly saith God, ‘Why dost thou preach my laws, and takest my covenant in thy mouth; Whereas thou hatest to be reformed, and hast cast my words behind thee? When thou sawest a thief, thou consentedst unto him, and hast been partaker with the adulterers. Thou does let thy mouth speak wickedness, and with thy tongue dost set forth deceit. Thou sittest and speakest against thy brother, and dost slander thine own mother’s son. These things hast thou done, and I held my tongue, and thou thoughtest that I am even such a one as thyself; but I will reprove thee, and set before thee the things that thou hast done. Psalm 50:16-21. (1)

Early in the sixteenth century, the Parliament of England under King Henry VIII passed a number of Acts which took the Church of England out from under the authority of the Bishop of Rome, i.e., the Pope. While this was done for base reasons – to allow the king to divorce a wife, whom he had no Scriptural grounds to divorce, and whom he had needed special ecclesiastical permission to marry in the first place – it had the effect of correcting, at least in England, the great wrong that had been done to the Western Church when the Bishop of Rome had, against the doctrines and traditions of the undivided early Church, asserted his supremacy over the entire Church.

This act of government contained much that is worthy of condemnation, as well as much that is worthy of praise, but it created for the English Church a unique opportunity, the opportunity to carry out the reforms that Luther and Calvin were calling for in continental Europe within a Church that had full organizational and organic continuity with that established by Christ and His Apostles in the first Century. She was not a sect or denomination started up from scratch, by reformers excommunicated by corrupt ecclesiastical authorities, like several of her counterparts on the Continent. She consisted of the same parishes, in the same dioceses, under the same bishops in Apostolic succession, after the Act of Supremacy that she had consisted of before. She administered the same sacraments, and recognized the same creeds – Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian.

Once she was removed from Roman control she gradually introduced some important and much needed reforms. The liturgy was translated into the beautiful English of the Book of Common Prayer, a series of official vernacular translations of the Bible culminated in the majestic King James Version of 1611, and, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, in which the supreme authority of the Holy Scriptures was asserted, as was the Scriptural truth that we are saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, without any help from our own efforts, was produced as the Church’s confession of faith. She became a Church that was both reformed and catholic, which asserted the great truths of the Reformation, while being part of the “One, Holy, Apostolic, and Catholic Church” in every sense, being in organic continuity with the undivided Church that had produced the Creed from which those words were taken, back in the fourth century AD.

The unique situation of the Church of England, made it possible for her to possess the strengths and enjoy the blessings of both Catholicism and Protestantism. It also made her vulnerable to the weaknesses and failings of both. Both the strengths and weaknesses of both the Catholic tradition and the reformed faith have manifested themselves repeatedly throughout Anglican history. She has experienced vast periods of spiritual death and dryness and often been plagued with Erastianism and simony but has also been frequently blessed with revival, including both the evangelical revival led by the Wesleys in the eighteenth century and the Catholic revival led by the Oxford Tractarians (2) in the nineteenth century.

Today there is a trend in the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, that violates both components of the Anglican tradition. I refer to the movement to reverse traditional and Scriptural teachings about homosexuality.

This movement is several decades old. The organization that, with an irony it does not recognize, calls itself Integrity Canada, (3) and which exists for the express purpose of promoting acceptance of homosexuality within the Anglican Church of Canada, was first organized in 1975 according to its website. Its American parent organization had been founded the year previously. My paternal grandmother received The Mustard Seed, the newspaper of the Diocese of Brandon, and I would read it whenever I visited her. I don’t recall exactly when I started reading these, just that it was in the eighties some time, but I do remember that the largest part of the letters to editor section always seemed to consist of arguments about homosexuality. More recently, a number of dioceses have passed resolutions at their synods asking their bishops to authorize the use of rites blessing same-sex relationships, despite a moratorium on the subject that is supposed to be in place, having been agreed upon at the national synod. Beginning in 2002 with Michael Ingham in the Diocese of New Westminster in British Columbia, several bishops have granted their concurrence to these resolutions. On November 1st of this year, our own Bishop Donald Phillips issued his concurrence to such a resolution, (4) which had passed by majority of over two-thirds a couple of weeks earlier at the 111th synod of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land. (5)

This problem is not limited to the Anglican Church, of course. It is present in many other denominations as well. The United Church of Canada, the denomination in which I grew up, began ordaining openly homosexual clergy back in the late 1980s and performs same-sex marriages. Same-sex blessings are available in many other mainstream Protestant denominations as well. The reasons that we will be looking at as to why this sort of thing should not be done apply to all Christian Churches.

One major reason for this is the influence of the surrounding culture upon the Church. In previous ages limitations and restrictions upon human desires were regarded as necessary for basic human survival as well as for any sort of higher civilization. The modern way of thinking is very different to this. In the modern age, human happiness came to be conceived of in terms of the fulfillment of the individual’s every desire and limitations upon those desires, even if those limitations were natural, came to be regarded as obstacles to be overcome. Modern science and technology were bent towards this goal of the elimination of limitations upon human desire. (6) In the period just before and after World War II, the intellectual foundations were laid for a revolution against traditional restraints upon human sexuality. (7) It did not take long for that revolution to materialize. In 1953 Hugh Hefner founded Playboy Magazine which would proclaim the message of sexual liberation to heterosexual males. Ten years later, the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique launched the second wave of feminism, the so-called “Women’s Liberation Movement” which had as one of its objectives the promotion among women of the same liberation from traditional restraints upon sexuality for women that the “Playboy philosophy” was promoting among men. Meanwhile, during the 40’s and 50’s, Marxist intellectuals had been at work in the universities, undermining their students’ respect for parental and other traditional authority by teaching that the traditional culture was hopelessly corrupt, hypocritical, based upon greed, and the source of injustice, oppression, and war, and planting in their students’ minds the seeds of rebellion. When these seeds produced fruit in the “counter-cultural” student rebellion movement of the 1960’s, one of the expressions of this “counter-culture” was the “free love” that the philosophical enemies of Christianity had been calling for centuries. The sexual revolution was underway, empowered by the technological development of effective and inexpensive birth control. (8)

The sexual revolution wrought a change in the prevailing attitude towards homosexuality in the secular culture. At first this new attitude was a liberal attitude of tolerance. Then it became a politically correct attitude. So-called political correctness refers to the late twentieth century phenomenon, in which the force of social and cultural pressure is used to the maximum degree to enforce the replacement of traditional ideas with modern, egalitarian, ideas. In this case the liberal attitude of tolerance towards homosexuality as an “alternative lifestyle” to the norm of heterosexual marriage developed into the politically correct attitude that full social and cultural acceptance of homosexuality is a basic human right of homosexuals, that to deny them that full acceptance is to perpetuate an historical injustice, and that the traditional idea that homosexuality is sinful must be driven from polite society and rejected as “homophobia”.

It is in this cultural context that the movement within the Church to reverse traditional and Scriptural teachings on homosexuality and have the Church bless same-sex relationships came into existence. It is regrettable that the decaying, surrounding culture would have such influence in the Church as to cause its leaders to seek to alter Church teaching and practice to conform to the decay in explicit disobedience to St. Paul’s injunction to the Church in Rome:

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service, And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may truly prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God. (Romans 12:1-2)

In fairness to those pushing for this change, many of them feel that they are following Jesus’ example and simply practicing the love Jesus so frequently commanded His disciples to practice. Jesus, they point out, was harshly criticized by the religious people of His day, for “eating with sinners”. That is true, but they fail to acknowledge the difference between what they are doing and what Jesus did, a difference far larger than any similarity. Jesus did not shun the company of sinners, but He did not condone sin either, much less bless it. He called the sinner to repentance and forgiveness.

The leaders of the movement to have the Church institute a rite of blessing for same-sex relationships also see themselves as continuing the Anglican tradition of accommodation for theological differences. In the Anglican tradition, so long as one conformed to the Elizabethan Settlement and did not rock the boat, there was a great deal of leeway to interpret the tradition in either a more Catholic (High Church) or a more Protestant (Low Church) way.

The movement towards same-sex blessings, however, violates both sides of classical Anglicanism.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, Richard Hooker, the Master of the Temple Church in London and later the rector of St. Mary the Virgin in Bishopbourne, Kent, wrote a multi-volume treatise defending the organization, practices, and teachings of the Church of England against the attacks of the Puritans. The Puritans were radical Protestants, and in many cases republicans who used their religious zeal to cloak their seditious activities, who wished to see the abolition of the office of bishop, the reorganization of the Church of England along the model of the Church John Calvin had established in Geneva, and every ritual and practice that resembled those of the Roman Church abolished unless a clear text commanding them could be found somewhere in Scriptures. In Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Hooker answered the Puritans by arguing that just because the Scriptures do not command something, does not mean that they forbid it and that in fact, it is the reverse of this that was the case. In making this argument, Hooker upheld the final authority of Scripture, but also gave weight to tradition and reason. Since then, the idea of an appeal to the three-fold authority of Scripture, tradition, and reason has been a basic element of Anglican theology.

The Catholic side of Anglicanism emphasizes tradition, the Protestant side emphasizes the Scriptures. These are complementary rather than contradictory emphases. Tradition is that which is handed down or passed on. In the Scriptures, St. Paul commanded the Church in Thessalonica to “stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” and described the Gospel as a tradition to the Corinthian Church when he introduced it with the words “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received.” The Holy Scriptures themselves are a tradition – we have them because the Church has faithfully passed them down to us through the centuries. The traditions of any organic community have, within that community, what we call prescriptive authority, that is authority backed by the weight of ancient use. This is true of the traditions of the Church which, as the Body of Christ, is the most organic of communities. The Holy Scriptures have a greater authority than that, however, for they are the written Word of God and therefore speak with God’s own authority.

Same-sex blessings, violate both tradition and Scripture. The movement to affirm and bless same-sex relationships is only a few decades old and the weight of two thousand years of Church tradition, from the Apostles to the present, is against it. It is not a matter of updating the tradition or bringing it into the twenty-first century. Some change is necessary, in any tradition, in order to keep the tradition alive, but that does not mean that a tradition can survive any and every kind of change.

The difference between a change that preserves a tradition and a change that destroys a tradition can be illustrated with the analogy of translation. In the Book of Common Prayer, Thomas Cranmer translated “Credo in unum Deum, Patrem Omnipoténtem, Factórem cæli et terræ, Visibílium ómnium et invisibílium”, the first section of the Nicene Creed, as “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” This translation accurately and faithfully expresses the essence of the Latin text in English. If however, we were to render it as “I feel in touch with a higher power or powers, that you can call God if you like, who is Father/Mother over our process of becoming” we would destroy its essential meaning altogether.

The introduction of same-sex blessings is the latter kind of change. It does not just introduce a new practice that had not previously been a part of the tradition, nor is it merely an updating of style, form, and appearance that leaves the essence of the tradition intact. If the Church blesses erotic relationships between people of the same sex it is blessing what the tradition up until now has condemned as sinful. Since this change also goes against the teachings of Scripture it should not be considered at all, but even were it not the case that it went against Scripture a change of this magnitude should only ever be considered when a case can be made that the change is absolutely necessary, should never be made with haste, and should only ever be undertaken after every factor has been reflected upon at length and with the utmost caution. (9) In this case, however, the cause of same-sex blessings has been aggressively pursued by activists determined to see the change happen regardless of what Scripture, tradition, and the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada have to say.

Of course many of these activists maintain that same-sex blessings are not really contrary to the teachings of Scripture after all. Let us now briefly examine the validity of the arguments they use to support this counter-intuitive idea.

In the Torah, God says rather plainly “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” (Leviticus 18:22)

Now those who wish to affirm and bless same-sex relationships will point out that this commandment is part of the Mosaic Code which contains plenty of things Christians don’t follow today, such as animal sacrifices, dietary restrictions that prohibit the eating such things as pork and shellfish, and the Jewish calendar of feasts, and argue that since we are not bound by these parts of the Mosaic Code we should not be found by this verse either.

There are several major flaws in that argument.

First, the Christian Church has New Testament Scriptural authority for not following these other parts of the Mosaic Code. The Book of Hebrews explains that the Old Testament sacrificial system was given as an illustration of the one, ultimate, sacrifice, which would effectively take away the sins of the world, the death of Jesus Christ on the cross (Hebrews. 9:12-10:18). The tenth chapter of the Book of Acts records how St. Peter was given a vision in which he was commanded to eat animals that were unclean under the Mosaic Code but which he was told were now clean.

Second, the New Testament does not lift the commandment in Leviticus 18:22 but rather reinforces it. In his first epistle to Timothy, St. Paul identifies “them that defile themselves with mankind” as being among the “lawless and disobedient” who are the reason we need laws, in his first epistle to the Corinthian Church he says that “the effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” shall not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven, and in his epistle to the Church in Rome he describes same-sex erotic relationships among both sexes as “vile affections” that God gives people up to once they turn from worshipping Him to worshipping idols (1 Timothy 1:9-10,1 Corinthians 6:9-10, Romans 1:26-27).

Third, when God gave the ceremonial aspects of the Mosaic Law, His given reason for doing so was to make the Israelites a holy people, i.e., to set them apart from other peoples and mark them as belonging to Him. In the eleventh chapter of Leviticus, for example, where He says which animals are clean and which are unclean, He follows up the instructions by saying “For I am the LORD your God: ye shall therefore sanctify yourselves and ye shall be holy; for I am holy.” (v. 44) While we often think of holiness in terms of purity, the primary meaning of the word is “separateness.” He does not say that the other nations are doing wrong in eating the animals that He describes as “unclean” for the Israelites, and in fact in the ninth chapter of Genesis He told the human race after the Flood that He was giving them all birds, fish, and beasts to eat, and made no distinction there between clean and unclean.

This is not the case with the commandments in the eighteenth chapter of Leviticus. This chapter opens with God speaking to Moses and instructing him to tell the Israelites that they are not to do the things that were done in Egypt and Canaan but are to follow the judgements and ordinances of the Lord; then He lists several specific things they are not to do, after which He declares:

Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you: And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants. Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you: (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled;) That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you. For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people. Therefore shall ye keep mine ordinance, that ye commit not any one of these abominable customs, which were committed before you, and that ye defile not yourselves therein: I am the LORD your God. (vv. 24-30)

This sort of language is never used of the ceremonial aspects of the Mosaic Code that are set aside as requirements for Christians in the New Testament. The Sabbath, the dietary laws, the holy days, etc. were enjoined upon Israel to set her apart and mark her as belonging to God. There is not a trace of condemnation for anyone outside of Israel for not following these commandments. When the Gospel is to be preached to the Gentiles, and the Gentiles integrated into the Church alongside Jewish believers, these commandments are set aside.

The practices forbidden in the eighteenth chapter of Leviticus, however, have defiled the Canaanites and their land, have brought God’s judgement upon these people, and will bring a similar judgement upon the Israelites if they practice them. Compare this chapter with the twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy. In this chapter God gives Israel His instructions as to how they are to conduct themselves in war. The Israelites are commanded, when they go against a city, to make overtures of peace and only to fight if the offer of peace is rejected. This rule, however, did not apply to cities belonging to the nations then living in the land God had promised to Israel. These were to be utterly destroyed to the last living soul in order “That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods.” The practices forbidden in the eighteenth chapter of Leviticus are these abominations, which are so abhorrent that God ordered Israel to annihilate the nations that practiced them lest they be tainted with them. (10)

Clearly, therefore, the acts prohibited in that chapter are not described in the Scriptures as being merely mala prohibita for the Israelites, i.e., wrong only because the law forbids them and subject to change in the law, but as mala in se, wicked in and of themselves. The only thing left to those who believe the Church should be blessing same-sex relationships and who don’t want to be perceived as casting Biblical authority aside, is to argue that the particular kind of same-sex relationships they wish to see affirmed and blessed are somehow different from those condemned in Scripture.

Those who make that argument, claim that the passages condemning homosexual acts in the Bible, are only talking about homosexual promiscuity, prostitution, rape, and ritual homosexuality in connection with idolatrous worship. They claim that committed, loving, monogamous same-sex relationships are not mentioned in Scripture and are therefore not condemned. This is a very dubious argument. Even if we accepted the questionable claim that the Greek words used in verses like 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 have a narrow meaning that covers only specific types of homosexuality, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind” is rather clear and lacking in exceptions and qualifications. A much stronger Scriptural case than this should be required if the Church is going to make a decision to alter two thousand years of Christian doctrine and practice. (11)

The decision to bless same-sex relationships is a wrong decision. It goes against both Scripture and tradition, and indeed, indicates that for many in the Church the authority of Scripture, tradition, and reason has been replaced with that of emotion, popular sentiment, and what is socially in vogue. It is a major alteration of an ancient tradition, made without a compelling necessity or the prudence, caution, and restraint appropriate to changes of this magnitude. It is an assault upon the unity, holiness, Catholicity, and Apostolicity of the Church, since it is a divisive decision which conforms the Church to a rapidly decaying and corrupt culture, in rejection of the doctrine of the Apostles which has been taught and believed everywhere, in all times, and by everyone throughout the Church. (12)

After the Diocese of New Westminster became the first diocese in the Anglican Church of Canada to approve these same-sex blessings, Ted and Virginia Byfield, commenting on the event, noted that the Anglican Church has long consisted of what they call the "Establishment Church", which "represents anything conventional opinion happens to approve at the time", and the "Dissident Church", including both High and Low wings, which "represents Jesus Christ".  "All of Anglicanism's great achievements--and there have been many--were the work of the Dissidents", the Byfields declared, and noted that whenever the Establishment party was in control, the Anglican Church declined, but when it was led by the Dissidents,"it invariably prosperes". (13)

For much of the last century, since the 1930 Lambeth Confrence where the Anglican Communion had the dubious distinction of being the first Church to break with the two thousand year Christian consensus against artificial contraception, the Establishment Wing has led the Church into making one stupid decision after another to conform with an increasingly anti-Christian, corrupt and progressive culture.   It is time for the Dissidents to lead the Church again, before the Establishment Wing eliminates every last vestige of recognizable Christianity from her.

(1) From the Psalter in the 1962, Canadian revision of the Book of Common Prayer. The Book of Common Prayer takes its Psalter from the Great Bible of 1539, which was a revision of the Tyndale Bible intended for official use in the Church of England. As the official, authorized, Bible of the Church of England, it was replaced by first the Bishop’s Bible and then the King James Bible, long before the standard 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer was published, but the Psalter in the prayer book remained that of the Great Bible.

(2) John Henry Newman, John Keble, Edward Pusey, etc..

(3) The name comes from the way this organization translates Psalm 84:11. This verse states that God will withhold no good thing from “them that walk uprightly”. They replace the “walk uprightly” that appears in the Authorized Bible and most other translations with “walk with integrity”.

(4) http://www.rupertsland.ca/wp-content/uploads/Synod-res-B-3-Final-Concurrence-21.pdf

(5) http://www.rupertsland.ca/wp-content/uploads/Minutes-of-Synod-2012-authorized-version.pdf

(6) Canadian philosophical conservative George Grant was a noted critic of modernity and technology. Influenced by the ideas of Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, Leo Strauss, and Jacques Ellul, he argued that technology, the blending of science and art, was the means whereby modern man accomplished two questionable goals – casting off traditional restraints upon the passions and asserting imperial domination over nature, himself, and his fellow man. This pops up constantly throughout his writings and, in a CBC interview with David Cayley, later published in George Grant in Conversation (Concord: Anansi Press, 1995), Grant said, regarding Pope John Paul II, “I have some sympathy for him in what he is trying to oppose, something which is absolutely central to modernity: the emancipation of the passions”

(7) Beginning with Margaret Mead’s The Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928, the school of Cultural Anthropology founded by Franz Boaz began producing “studies” of tribal societies in which restraints upon sexuality were absent, resulting supposedly, in a peaceful, harmonious, idyllic, existence. In 1948 and 1953, Alfred Kinsey’s reports on human sexuality were published, the findings of which suggested that deviation from heterosexual monogamy was more widespread that previously thought. In 1955, Herbert Marcuse, a Frankfurt School neo-Marxist teaching at Columbia University, published his Eros and Civilization, a response of sorts to Sigmund Freud’s 1930 Civilization and Its Discontents, challenging Freud’s conclusion that restrictions on sexuality are essential to civilization, answering Freud’s unanswered question of whether civilization is worth the price with a no, and calling for the elimination of restraints upon sexuality. In recent decades, the methodology and the conclusions of both the Boaz school of Anthropology and the Kinsey Reports have been shown to be deeply flawed. See Dr. Derek Freedman’s Margaret Mead in Samoa: the Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, (Harvard University Press, 1983) and The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research, (Basic Books, 1999) and regarding the Kinsey Reports, Dr. Judith G. Reisman’s Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People, (Lafayette: Huntington House, 1990) and Sexual Sabotage: How One Mad Scientist Unleashed a Plague of Corruption and Contagion on America (WND Books, 2010).

(8) This development empowered the sexual revolution, because it allowed the revolutionaries to argue that since technology had now made it possible to have sexual intercourse without the fear of an unwanted pregnancy, the old rules governing sexual conduct were obsolete and could be eliminated. The obvious flaw in this argument is that prevented inconvenient pregnancies was not the only reason for the old rules. Another flaw can be inferred from the fact that the demand for the lifting of restrictions upon abortion increased after the invention of the birth control pill.

(9) Richard Hooker wrote “For the world will not endure to hear that we are wiser than any have been which went before. In which consideration there is cause why we should be slow and unwilling to change, without very urgent necessity, the ancient ordinances, rites, and long approved customs, of our venerable predecessors. The love of things ancient doth argue stayedness, but levity and want of experience maketh apt unto innovations.” Of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V, chapter vii, 3. This can be found on page 90 of Volume 2, of The Works of Richard Hooker, the 2010 print-on-demand edition, arranged by Michael Russell from John Keble’s 1836 edition. If this is the case with regards to the customs and ceremonies of the Church, how much more so is it the case of her ethical teachings.

(10)The account of Sodom and Gomorrah, in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis, is not sufficient in itself to establish that same-sex erotic relationships are intrinsically sinful, because it was rape the men of Sodom were intent upon, and someone could always argue that it was only the intended rape and not the fact that it was same-sex that was deemed wicked. Although the counterargument could be made that if that were the case, Lot’s offer of his daughters as a substitute makes little sense, God did tell the prophet Ezekiel to say that the sin of Sodom consisted of pride, arrogance, greed, idleness, and neglect and indifference to the needy, as well as sexual perversion (Ezekiel 16:49-50). Nevertheless, when the account of Sodom is compared to the very similar account, at the end of the Book of Judges, of the Benjamites of Gibeah, a point can be made that reinforces what we have seen about the seriousness of the prohibitions in the eighteenth chapter of Leviticus. Sodom and Gomorrah, were cities in Canaan, judged for their wickedness in the days of Abraham. The Book of Judges, begins by telling how the Israelities failed to carry out God’s commandment regarding the nations of Canaan but had instead made peace treaties with many of them, and how as a result they were led astray into committing the abominations of these nations. This began a cyclical pattern of their falling into these abominations, being judged by God, repenting and being restored, and then falling again, which is well established in the Book of Judges and which continues throughout the Old Testament history. In the nineteenth chapter of the Book of Judges, there is an account in which a Levite, travelling with his servant and his concubine, enters the Benjamite city of Gibeah and accepts the hospitality of an Ephraimite who lives there. The men of Gibeah, recreate the sin of Sodom by besieging the house, and demanding that the Levite be turned over to them that they “may know him.” The Levite’s concubine is turned over to them and the incident results in a civil war in which the tribe of Benjamin is reduced to six hundred men. The point of this narrative, placed at the end of the Book of Judges, is that the Israelites, having been ensnared by the sinful ways of the nations they had failed to destroy, had become the new Sodom.

(11) I have said nothing about the third traditional Anglican authority, reason. This is not because I think the decision to bless same-sex relationships is reasonable. The decision was made to conform to a culture, in which “male” and “female” are regarded as malleable categories, to be defined by each individual for him/her/itself, in which a person’s sex is regarded as something that can be changed through surgery but his “sexual orientation” is an unchangeable destiny, fixed in stone from birth, in which those who express their belief that homosexual acts are sinful in an irenic fashion are accused of “hate” in words full of anger, vulgarity, and contempt by those who claim to believe in tolerance and love. That is hardly a rational choice.

(12) “Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est” is the canon of fifth century St. Vincent of Lerins, a traditional brief way of explaining how to identify the small-o orthodox or small-c catholic faith.

(13) Ted and Virginia Byfield, "As goes the Royal Bank, so goes  Canada's Anglican Church, the slave of social conformity", Report Newsmagazine, National Edition, July 8, 2002, p. 51

Moral Sanity and Abortion

There is perhaps no topic that better illustrates Richard Weaver’s statement that “modern man has become a moral idiot” than the topic of abortion. The arguments made by virtually everybody except the Roman Catholic Church on this topic display a complete inability to grasp basic ethical principles let alone to reason properly and form sound ethical conclusions.

The word “abort” is a verb which has as its object a procedure. To abort something is to stop it prematurely, before it has run its course. When we speak of “abortion” we refer to the act of prematurely stopping a pregnancy which in ordinary circumstances must lead to the death of the developing foetus.

Here the Roman Catholic Church draws a distinction. The Roman Catholic Church says that the term “abortion” is properly applied only to procedures which are undertaken with the purpose of ending a pregnancy. A process that is undertaken for another purpose, such as surgery to save a pregnant mother’s life, that has as a secondary consequence the termination of the pregnancy is not an abortion. Upon initially hearing of this distinction, some might argue that this is purely semantic, splitting hairs, and allowing on the one hand what is forbidden on the other, similar to how the Roman Church’s stance on “annulment” and “divorce” is often seen.

That is not the case here. Here the Roman Catholic Church is applying fundamental ethical principles.

It is right to do good to others. Saving someone’s life is a good example of doing good to others. It is wrong to do harm to others unjustly. Taking someone’s life unjustly is pretty much the supreme example of this. The qualifier “unjustly” is necessary because we live in a fallen world, where people do evil to others, which sometimes requires that they be harmed to stop them from doing evil to oneself or to another person (this is called self-defense and it is recognizably just) and sometimes requires that the community in its law-making and enforcing capacity administer justice by inflicting upon a law-breaker the harm he has done to others. This must always be an act of the community carried out by those holding lawfully constituted authority to administer justice.

What happens when doing good to others results in harm to a third party? Here is where we must be careful. We do not want to carelessly overlook the harm our intended good to one person or group of persons may inflict upon a third party, much less to dismiss or justify that harm, by our intended good.

Thus, in the case of a doctor who is contemplating surgery to save the life of a pregnant mother who recognizes that the surgery will likely or surely also result in the termination of the pregnancy, the doctor must not thoughtlessly reason “well, I’m doing good by saving the mother’s life, therefore it is sad but alright that the foetus will probably die as a result”. This is a situation that the doctor and the expecting parents must consider together and what makes it permissible for them to go ahead with the surgery is the fact that the death of the foetus is probably inevitable either way. If the mother will die if the pregnancy continues to full term then the foetus will almost certainly die too. Therefore, it is permissible and just to save the mother’s life even with the knowledge that doing so will almost certainly mean death for the foetus.

It would certainly not be right, however, for a couple who wish to terminate a pregnancy for other motivations, to ask a doctor to falsely declare the expectant mother’s life to be in danger for the purpose of justifying a procedure that will result in the death of the foetus. Nor would it be right for the doctor to comply with such a request.

It is certainly not right for a society to declare that abortion must be available to any woman who wants it, legally, and at the society’s expense on the grounds that some mothers find their lives endangered by their pregnancies. A morally sane person can see that a moral dilemma exists in a case where the mother’s life is endangered by pregnancy and that the decision to save the mother’s life, while just, cannot be arrived at lightly. This must not be used to justify terminating pregnancies in other situations. There the moral dilemma does not exist because abortion is just plain wrong.

There are areas where a strong case can be made both for “this behavior is right” and “this behavior is wrong”. This is not one of them. To terminate a pregnancy is to terminate a human life. As mentioned above, terminating a human life can in certain circumstances be justified. If you accidentally kill someone, and there is no way you could have prevented the accident, if it is not the result of negligence of some sort, you are not morally culpable for the death. If someone is attacking you or others and he cannot be stopped in any other way than by killing him you are justified in taking his life. If someone has murdered somebody else then the lawful authorities of the community are justified in imposing death as a penalty upon the murderer. If a state of war exists between your country and another country and you are called upon to do your duty to your country by fighting for her in war, your killing the soldiers of your country’s enemy on the battlefield is not murder on your part. Abortion does not fall within any of these categories of “justifiable homicide”.

It must therefore fall within the category of “murder”. That is the only conclusion available for a morally sane person.

The arguments people use to avoid this conclusion are quite revealing.

There is the “what if the mother’s life is in danger” argument which we have already addressed. There is also the “rape” argument.

“Rape is sexual intercourse that is forced upon a person against their consent. If a woman gets pregnant as a result of a rape, how can it be just to force her to go through 9 months of pregnancy and to nurture and raise the child of the man who raped her?” The answer, of course, is that it is not just, but neither is it just to allow her to have an abortion for this reason. The human life growing within her – which is an outgrowth of her own life as well as that of her rapist – bears no culpability for his father’s guilt. She will not have to nurture and raise the child after the pregnancy if she does not wish to do so as she can give the baby up to adoption. The pregnancy will undoubtedly be traumatic for her as a constant reminder of the event which caused the pregnancy. An abortion will be traumatic as well and possibly even more so than carrying the pregnancy to term. Unfortunately, there is no just outcome to this scenario.

Like the case of the expecting mother whose life is endangered by her pregnancy, however, this is an extreme scenario. The vast majority of abortions, legal or illegal, are not done for reasons like these. If society were to decide that of the various unjust solutions to the problem of a woman pregnant due to rape the least unjust is to allow the woman to have an abortion that would still not warrant making abortion legal, easily accessible, and paid for by the government, to all women.

Some try to argue for liberal abortion laws by questioning who qualifies as a “person”. This argument can take on a number of forms. There is the form which says “the law defines personhood as beginning at birth”. All that proves, however, is that progressive liberals drew up the law. Neither truth nor fact can be generated by legislation. If human personhood begins at conception then no amount of laws saying that it begins at birth will change that fact. (1)

Another form of the argument is the agnostic form – “We cannot know when personhood begins”. While I don’t accept that as being valid, let us assume for a moment that it is. Ted Byfield irrefutably answered this argument decades ago. He wrote:

Here is a problem in “values” of the type that modern social studied teachers are encouraged to pose. Several men are out in the woods hunting. Suddenly one of them sees something move in the bush. At last he rejoiced, a deer. Then a warning flashes through his mind. That might not be a deer. That might be one of the other hunters. Question for the class: Should the hunter fire at the thing if there’s a chance it’s another human being? The approved answer is no. (2)

Mr. Byfield went on to explain that he had raised this scenario on a CBC television program where he put it to Dr. Henry Morganthaler! He said “the tape was killed, the program was never run, and I was never invited back”.

The point that Mr. Byfield had made was that it is not enough for the advocates of legal, open-access abortion, to cast doubt upon the status of a developing foetus as a “person” or “human being”. They have to prove that the foetus is not either of those things to make the case for legal abortion.

Having established that, we do not need to depend upon the burden of doubt. It is ridiculous to assert that we cannot know whether or not the foetus is a human being. Leave terms like “human being” and “person”, which have apparently become plastic and malleable in recent decades, and nonsensical rhetorical categories like “potential human being” aside. The foetus is unquestionably a human life. When a human sperm fertilizes a human egg, a zygote is formed which possesses a full set of human chromosomes, a mix from its father and mother which are unique to itself. The process of growth through cell division and replication begins immediately. This is a new life, a unique life, and a human life, from the moment of conception. All scientific facts support this.

That should settle the question for anyone possessed of a modicum of moral sanity. The foetus is a life and is identifiably human, terminating its life falls within none of the categories of justifiable homicide, therefore abortion must be murder. The “pro-choice” movement however argues that “a woman has the right to control her own body”.

It is here that the progressive liberals believes that they have made their own irrefutable argument. The argument is worded in such a way that a denial would have to take the form of “no, a woman does not have the right to control her own body” which would seem to suggest that someone else does, making that women as a class are under the perpetual control of that someone else.

There is a question here, that is desperately looking for an answer. Why does “abortion must be legally accessible to all women” logically proceed from the assertion “a woman has the right to control her own body”? Or to put it another way, why does a woman’s having the right to control her own body mean that she has the absolute right to the final decision of whether another human life lives or dies?

What these questions reveal is that “a woman’s right to control her own body” is not the definitive, irrefutable, argument that the “pro-choice” movement wants it to be. As George and Sheila Grant put it:

When the argument for easy abortion is made on the basis of rights, it clearly rests on the weighing of the rights of some against the rights of others. The right of a woman to have an abortion can only be made law by denying to another member of our species the right to exist. The right of women to freedom, privacy and other good things is put higher than the right of the foetus to continued existence. (3)

Or, as the old adage puts it, “your right to swing your first ends where my nose begins”.

What this means is that no person’s rights are so absolute that they are not limited by the rights of others. Now since that argument must apply to the right of the foetus to life as well, does that leave us in limbo, in a stalemate where the rights of women and the rights of foeti perpetually cancel each other out?

The “pro-choice” answer is to state that the rights of a mature, rational, woman must take precedence over the rights of a developing foetus. At first glance this seems to make sense, although this Nietzschean exaltation of the rights of the strong over the rights of the weak is oddly inconsistent with the egalitarianism that most members of the feminist and “pro-choice” movements claim to believe in. If we look at it more closely, however, we realize that there is another factor that needs to be considered in addition to the status of those whose rights have come into potential conflict. That is the nature of the rights themselves. In the case of the foetus, the right in question is the right to survive, the right to live, the right to exist. In the case of the woman, the right in question is a right to decide and to act. Surely the former must take precedence over the latter in a rational hierarchy of rights, regardless of the status of the rights-bearer.

It is clear that sound, reasonable thinking about ethics, supported by biological science, is on the pro-life side in the abortion debate. Why then, is the other side winning and what could possibly draw someone to hold such an obviously wrong position?

This question became all the more puzzling to me several years ago when I read Dr. Lionel Tiger’s The Decline of Males for the first time. In that book, Dr. Tiger, who is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, in describing the effects of the invention of the birth control pill, wrote the following:

It is impossible to overestimate the impact of the contraceptive pill on human arrangements. The most striking display of this is the baffling historical fact that after the pill became available in the mid-1960’s, the pressure for liberal abortion intensified worldwide. This is remarkably, even profoundly, counterintuitive. It is also an implacable historical reality. Only after women could control their reproduction excellently did they need more and more safe abortions. (4)

Counterintuitive is an understatement. The invention of effective oral contraception meant that women no longer required the cooperation of men if they wished to have heterosexual intercourse without getting pregnant. You would normally expect that this would have decreased whatever demand for abortion there was. Instead it increased it. I had not considered how strange this was until Dr. Tiger pointed out the obvious.

Dr. Tiger’s explanation is that the increase in female control over fertility, meant a decrease in male confidence in their own paternity, and hence a lesser willingness on the part of men to stay with the women they impregnated, leading to the demand for abortion. This may have something to do with it – one would think, though, that if oral contraception created mistrust of women on the part of men it would take the form of suspicion they were taking the pill in secret and blaming the lack of offspring on male infertility than in an increase in the age-old fear of being cuckolded.

I’m more inclined to think that it is all about power. That is usually what lies behind demands that are couched in the terminology of rights. If the pill is regarded as a means of empowering women – it gave them more control over their fertility than they had ever possessed in the past – then what would be the next step in that empowerment process? Proclaiming that women have the right to decide to terminate their pregnancies. Such a right would inherently grant women unilateral decision-making authority over the survival of the human species – a tremendous blackmail tool and source of power.

Most women themselves probably would not have thought of it in those terms. Political radicals who seek to exploit issues pertaining to women to achieve their revolutionary goals, including power for themselves, would have thought of it this way, though.

Interestingly, however one wishes to explain the strange historical fact Dr. Tiger pointed out, it confirms the warnings which Pope Paul VI gave in Humanae Vitae about the consequences of artificial contraception. He warned, in that famous 1968 encyclical, that artificial birth control “could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards” and:

forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection. (5)

The position taken by Paul VI in Humane Vitae was the position of the entire Christian Church – Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant until very recently. In the four decades since the encyclical came out, Paul VI’s warnings have materialized. In Canada today, there are no legal restrictions on abortion and it is provided free to whoever wants it by the government out of our tax dollars.

It is best not to speculate on what the next exciting step on this road of progress free of all traditional ethical and moral restraints, will be. I’m sure we’ll find out, to our disgust and dismay, before too long.



(1) Similarly, no amount of legislation saying that a union between a man and a man, or a union between a woman and a woman, is a marriage, will ever make it so. The progressive liberal’s seeming faith in the ability of government to generate fact and truth by legal fiat is a superstition.

(2) Ted Byfield, “The question that got me thrown off a TV program”, originally his back page column for the July 25, 1980 issue of The Alberta Report, reprinted on page 105 of The Book of Ted: Epistles From an Unrepentant Redneck (Keystone Press: Edmonton, 1988)

(3) George P. Grant with Sheila Grant, “Abortion and Rights”, originally published as part of The Right To Birth: Some Christian Views on Abortion edited by Eugene Fairweather and Ian Gentles and published in 1976 by the Anglican Book Centre in Toronto, subsequently republished in Technology and Justice, a collection of Grant’s essays published by Anansi, also out of Toronto, in 1986, where it can be found on pages 117 to 130, this particular quotation coming from page 117.

(4) Lionel Tiger, The Decline of Males, (Golden Books: New York, 1999), p. 35. Bold indicates italics in the original.

(5) http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html